Some pre-sale questions

[Alicia]

I have been playing around with the trial, and so far I like it very much. It seems for the most part alot of customizations are intuitive.

My questions are these: (they are a mixed bag)

a) Does it matter whether you buy from a reseller, vs direct. Is there a way to verify the legitimacy of a reseller.

b) I was thinking of perhaps either buying a month or a year before doing an outright purchase. If purchase in this manner, do you get any credit..or are you paying lets say 299 then 499 (it would be support suite)?

c) Is there really a big difference between instalert and instalert pro?

d) When customizing fields-- for example in the registration form... how do you add a line ex. company name to the existing group without creating another group?

e) any known issues with this working on hostmonster?

Thank you in advance.

Alicia

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Alcia,

Welcome to the forums, and thank you for your interest in Kayako software.

a) Please ask our sales department (http://support.kayako.com) to verify the identity of a reseller.

b) I am sure our sales department would be able to arrange something for you in lieu of this; but only if you buy directly from Kayako.

c) The only difference is the biggest, which is the department and status tree is available on your desktop - allowing you to see how many tickets you have where, where open tickets are and gives you one-click access to these departments.

d) You would need to use the 'Custom' type of 'Custom Field', and add the HTML to the template yourself in order to avoid adding another field group; this is a complicated method, however. It may be worth simply having the additional group.

e) Not that I have heard of.

I hope I covered all of your questions; if you have any more, feel free to post back.

[craigbrass]

a) You haven't really answered the initial question Jamie. Buying via either method makes no difference. The licence is "transferred" over to you (ie you get a members area account with Kayako) after the purchase has been verified and assuming your support and upgrades are active, you can download updates and contact Kayako. Resellers often sell at a discount off Kayako's price and throw in freebies like installation, performing the upgrades, etc.

[PeteV]

I read somewhere that resellers are responsible for handling (some of) the customer support, correct?

Does this refer to the installation part (i.e., the reseller is responsible for installation troubleshooting), but not the usage part?

Or are resellers simply another sales avenue, and except for different prices and freebies, everything else is indeed 100% the same?

[craigbrass]

Resellers do not need to provide any support services but I know a few offer them free if the licence is purchased through them.

[PeteV]

Dear Craig.

On Reseller CP in the the "Reseller Q&A" section, it states:

###BEGIN
Who will handle end user customer support?

As a reseller it is your responsibility to support your clients. Each Owned license resold includes 90 days of Support & Upgrades.
###END

That seems to contradict your statement.

[Alicia]

Yes you did answer my questions so far..
Of course there are always more...

The field addition seems a bit complicated, but luckily its just one field that has to be done in that manner. I think it would be wonderful if customer oriented software did have a field for company name in registration. This is not the only software that omits that.

My site is a joomla site, and I see the site and kayako can share a log in. That is great and in the future would look forward to utilizing that....
I guess one thing that pops in my mind..do they have to come to the support pages to log in? Or can a login exist right on the main page as well.. This may be simple... You may tell me...extremely difficult... I am not sure...

And finally...well for now anyway.... down the road, there will be an ecommerce section of the site... most likely leaning toward pdg software.
Is it possible to have one unified log in for that too... So everything just requires one log in...

Thanks again...

[Alicia]

about the support--

what sales told me if i understand correctly, is 90 days of support through a reseller, and 180 days if bought directly.

[craigbrass]

As far as I am aware, those periods are correct but the reseller may choose to provide free support directly. If they don't or you want direct support, you simply renew and then you can contact Kayako directly.

[Alicia]

I figured the only way to truly test it was to buy a monthly subscription so I could truly test it within my site... So far so good.... a little confusion with the piping...but that will work itself out....

What i do need to know is this...as I continue my evaluation:

a) I did add a custom field of company name, that one fills out in registration. However when viewing the users....I dont see company name... Is there a way to have this field show in the staff users panel, and even be able to sort by company?

b) Can a custom field for company name be added to the chat?

c) Back to the log in ... as mentioned before..... more than likely pdg software will be the next addition to the site.... Is there a way there can be one shared log in with joomla, kayako and pdg.... Right now I have it simply under a joomla wrapper, which is fine because at this time I don't need any more log in other than kayako. But PDG is in the future.

I think that is it for now....

Thanks,
Alicia

[Alicia]

any thoughts??

[jnet]

Naturally you can't do what ever you want and there are bugs but all together kayako is a good software. I hope just the bugs get solved I am sure they are working on it.

I purchased owned license , alert pro and outlook synchronize
they are fine. go ahead and buy it.

Regards

[Alicia]

any chance of getting these additional questions answered?

I figured the only way to truly test it was to buy a monthly subscription so I could truly test it within my site... So far so good.... a little confusion with the piping...but that will work itself out....

What i do need to know is this...as I continue my evaluation:

a) I did add a custom field of company name, that one fills out in registration. However when viewing the users....I dont see company name... Is there a way to have this field show in the staff users panel, and even be able to sort by company?

b) Can a custom field for company name be added to the chat?

c) Back to the log in ... as mentioned before..... more than likely pdg software will be the next addition to the site.... Is there a way there can be one shared log in with joomla, kayako and pdg.... Right now I have it simply under a joomla wrapper, which is fine because at this time I don't need any more log in other than kayako. But PDG is in the future.

I think that is it for now....

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Alicia,

a) If you created a custom field group to be displayed under 'User Registration' and added a custom field to that group then it should be displayed under the manage users display, as below.



b) No - this is not possible, but it has been requested for version 4 of our product line.

c) It is possible to use LoginShare modules to enable SupportSuite to use another database of user accounts for user authentication. However, login is not shared - if you set up a Joomla LoginShare then even if your users login to Joomla, they will have to login again (albeit with the same credentials) to SupportSuite.

[Alicia]

thank you for the reply...after a brief hiatus I am back to this...


thanks again,alicia